Europa Universalis IV

Remove Kebab - +1.00 Morale. -3 Tolerance for Heathens.

 

How about no powerups at all

 

Generally the special idea groups aren't a huge power-up... Aside from exceptions like Sweden and Brandenburg/Prussia that get to have Imperial Sardaukar.

 

Most special idea groups are a pretty big powerup. I'm just hoping that they'll put in Al-Andalus for Granada already.

 

I found a funny way to bait an enemy army to a position where he will not be able to do the shattered retreat. If you intend to to fight many wars with some country, then first take some border provinces from him, leaving one of his provinces surrounded by your newly acquired provinces. In subsequent wars the first thing you do is to siege this single province with a small force and park the rest of your forces nearby. Soon the enemy army comes to relieve the siege, you defeat it, it retreats to one of the surrounding (YOUR) provinces and STOPS, you annihilate it, get a nice warscore, repeat the operation or proceed to sieging the rest of his provinces.

 

So i decided to get it after all before waiting for juicy expansion packs and i had a nice full grand campaign game with castille. I must say the carribean trade node is a gold mine, although i was not happy with the game handling me aragon on a plate. Too deterministic. What does +xxxx combat ability means? Is it like discipline but for only a specific unit type?

 

Combat Ability is a base damage increase in combat. Basically, a unit with +10% extra combat ability would first deal x1.10 damage, and with 125% discipline that damage would then be multiplied by 1.25. At least, that's how I understood it. Basically, you'll want as much Combat Ability AND Discipline as possible, though Discipline remains the king of land warfare, since it also reduces damage you take.

 

And just to explain the rest, fire/shock pips on generals and fire/shock pips on unit types are compared to enemies defenses and the difference is added/subtracted from your roll (worth about +-20% damage for each). Military tactics is another flat damage reducer. I'd say Tactics and pips are the real kings of land warfare, since they increase much more drastically. Getting a new unit with +2 attack and defense, or going from .25 tactics to .5 tactics is insane.

Morale is weird and doesn't get boosted from any other combat boosts other than pips. And, interestingly enough, the morale damage dealt goes up the higher your morale is.

 

I wish the save game converter would just automatically import pagan religions without requiring them to be reformed.

 

Actually it does, but they aren't applied without being reformed. Of course, there are easy ways to reform if you don't mind cheating a little to spice things up.

 

Castille is easy mode, like the other suggested "interisting" nations , they arent hiding it, its written for new players all over the place. Now try stuff like byzantium(in iron man ) without reading the strrategy guide and no EU3 previous experience, thats really difficut. Some say its too simplsitic, i dont think so this game is definitvely not dumbed down , nations dont really play he same , it takes hours to discover everything the game has to offer.

I am reading many codexers have problems conquering province of different cultural group, the trick is to make vassals, dont blob everything yet. Vassalize and with your new income build structure,s market places and such in your core loyal provinces. Do not waste your admin points ever, you will later diplo annex urbino and get all cores for free once you are stable with a strong army or better wait end game those usefull vassals will do all the sieging for you, ton of micro avoided while you wander with your doom stack with defensive ideass . If you cant take a big country in one war , just take as much provinces you want to , but be sure some of them contain core of small forgotten nations, you dont care of overextension, just release the minor nation as vassal and sell your provnces to it, make it your core bitch.

 

Byzantium is either very easy if you use the strait exploit or very hard if you dont. Unfortunately the exploit stems fro eu3 and I thin its there to appease the byzantophile crowd.

 

Byzantium was playable in EU3 because of the 1405 start date (a sacred date for all who play with balkan countries). Here it's only meaning is to get conquered by the Ottomans. I do however often see them collapsing under rebels and then Byz getting released.

 

The strait exploit is not enough in EU4 , many things can go wrong , crimea can join in with the ottoman fleet, bulgarian rebels have to be bribed before starting reconquista else a stack of 20 or more will insta gib your amy , if you are not aware of the strategy before hand its indeed extremely hard, in my opinon true gaming is done without reading guides.

 

So my Denmark game is going well enough so far. I was trying to eat up parts of the HRE as giant super Denmark after my personal union went through, but i kept getting cock blocked by France and there defender of the faith bullshit. I can take France in a fight i can not take HRE and France at the same, but finally Austria is Defender of the Faith and who cares about that. So now i am slowly cutting my way down taking more and more land, but now freaking Ottomans are almost at MY Baltic SEA!.

Soon the war will come so now i am trying to spread the true faith and make freinds. If the Ottoman jerks want a fight i will take them out.

Also Ironman mode is the way to play.

 

Am I right in saying that, currently, mercenaries have no effect other than being expensive? There isn't some event I'm missing here., right?

I played a few hours as Tyrone and couldn't help noticing nothing happened when I fielded an mercenary on Irish soil for a couple years.

 

Mercenaries also don't upgrade while hired I think, so you need to dismiss and hire newer replacements. Not sure how their reinforcements work.

 

It would've been nice to see mercenary armies subsist on looting provinces alone, like most armies were back then.

Currently, there's no way of accurately simulating the effects of a long-term war other than manpower loss. England seems to be riddled with rebels for the first decade of the game but all of a suddenly they are a strong power that can field armies of 20k

 

I never cared much for mercenaries in EU3 but when in 4 i ran out of manpower i noticed that i had 1k sitting in the bank and said what the heck let's try it, so i hired 10k mercs and won the war, surprisingly they are not that much more expensive than regular troops. With manpower filling slowly i might have to use them more. I wonder if AI uses them.

 

Each and every time a hostile army enters a province its looted. Your armies cant loot your provinces tho, and that happened. Guess its half done.

Yes, AI uses mercenaries quite extensively in need. It can be easily observed either when annexing vassals during longer wars or when destroying main armies of enemy nations and seeing them quickly build replacements - recruitment time shows they are mercenaries. Those are also situations where I use mercenaries so AI works fine in this regard.

 

And don't forget one's mercenaries were just as dangerous as hostile armies. Paradox did a lot better simulating them in CK2, I don't know why the same couldn't work with EU4

 

There are countries like Sweden, Burgundy or Venice, which ask about using mercenaries, but I didn't play as them yet.
For the most other countries mercenaries are only for emergency cases, like facing large rebellion or fighting against big coalition.
Part of it because, that dedicated to them idea group isn't that tempting to take. Sure, you can choose it and use mercs on constant basis. But it looked so much preferable to save your adm. points and idea slot on something else and stick with normal troops instead. The most obvious solution would be remove that group and add it's bonuses to military idea groups. So their usage will be more common.
Atleast Plutocracy is must have for any republic and Innovative give some nice bonuses to other things, so it worth picking and have some bonuses to mercs when they needed.

Other problem are how not problematic they are. Even in CK2 one could as count conquer entire kindom only because of them and they stayed loyal until they were paid. In EU4 mercs are even more lenient. As if one of the main points Machiavelli's "The Prince" weren't how one shouldn't rely primary on them in order to win his battles and how their unwise use completely fucked up Italy.
But one can always hope for some Italian Wars DLC, which would include some mercs improvements.

 

Just finished a Qing game. Wrested control of China from the decadent Ming, westernized thanks to the Portuguese, kicked said Portuguese out of Macau after westernizing, and eventually surpassed Russia. The westernizing mechanics are well implemented and the process isn't all that long or difficult if you prepare beforehand.

A few impressions -- why did they think it was a good idea to make tech compete with ideas for points? The way I see it (especially when playing a less developed nation that needs to catch up) only having three pools of points that don't fill up all that quickly to do practically everything, from constructing buildings to researching vital tech or raising stability (= constant shortage of admin points due to random events causing stab hits all the time), leads to less useful stuff just falling by the wayside. Why invest 400 so points in a marginally interesting idea when tech development provides vastly superior benefits for approximately the same cost?

 

How did you managed to do it? How did you survive being at -3 stab with the size of china? How long did it take? Was your ruler good at admin?

Well you see as a western nation you will often have ahead of time tech penalty so while waiting for that to wear off you can dump the monarch points in ideas. Oh you are not a western nation? What a shame.

 

Yeah, I had a pretty decent ruler (6 admin points), and his successor wasn't bad either (5 points). Fortunately the process didn't drag on any longer as his grandson turned out to be an idiot. All in all I was getting +10 admin per month or so. I basically got my country in order, plenty of money, a minister to reduce stab costs + banning neo-confucianism (also reduces costs) and enough rebel-hunting forces to put down the inevitable uprisings and went on with it. I was able to put 1 point into stab soon enough, lucked out and got another point from an event (worth it, they cost about 290 points each with the Western Influences penalty) and managed to crawl up to 1 point positive stab. I managed to get it to 2 points every now and then, but then you could expect the inevitable comet sighted or westernization event to bring it down one notch. All in all the process took 17 years of fairly uneventful rebel-hunting, from 1691 to 1708.